


participation medals

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a softer animorphs [6]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: F/F, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 08:52:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11309982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Ah, unrequited love.  When your best isn’t enough.  (Participation medals of the heart.)Melissa falls in love as a child, and years later she watches the girl she adores turn into something sharp and dangerous.  It's hard to abandon your sun, even when it goes supernova.





	participation medals

**Author's Note:**

> Lalala, someday I will learn how to publish stuff on time.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has given feedback on this series! You guys have no idea, I make this little "mrp?" surprised cat noise of delight every time I get a comment on these fics.
> 
> Listen, Melissa Chapman SCREAMS unrequited love lesbian, I will hear no debate. I recommend Hayley Kiyoko's Sleepover for this fic.

Melissa knew from when she was little, that she wasn’t quite right.  Her mother thought it was cute, the way her daughter worshipped Disney princesses and couldn’t be bothered with the princes and heroes.  Her father laughed and scooped Melissa up and spun her around, and called her _his_ princess.  It took her a few years to realize that most little girls wanted to marry Prince Philip or Li Shang, not Aurora or Mulan.

They would be okay with it, she thought, her mom and dad.  Or they would have been, before things changed.  Now, she didn’t know if they would even care, one way or another.

Melissa tried to tell herself that apathy was a lot more than some people could hope for.

Gymnastics, for a while, had been an escape, total freedom—the feeling of her body being purely under her control, the grace of it, was bliss.  Melissa started when she was little, too little to really look at the other girls except as playmates, as competition.  They were all friends of circumstance, but few of those bonds seemed like they would last.

It had been the summer when Melissa’s class was eleven, and everyone had gone away on vacation.  Melissa had stayed, but she didn’t mind—she probably walked across the entire city that summer, free and cheerful and gloriously tired at the end of the day.  She had found a coffee shop run by a woman her parents’ age and her girlfriend, and they called her sweetheart and always gave her a free cookie.  Melissa, in her sundresses and sandals, had thought they were miraculous.  Later, she wondered how they had known, whether she had done or said something or whether like just tended to recognize like. 

Then the others came back, and Melissa felt like her lungs were trying to crawl up through her throat.

Rachel got _tall_ over the summer.  She had always had the long bones that suggested she would come into some height, but now Rachel was all legs, her fingers slender and tipped with a pale pink-red color that made her skin glow.  Her hair had grown over the summer, a sheet of gold, and she had lost some of the roundness of childhood—not all, just enough to suggest that she was going to be _heartstopping_ when she was done growing up.  Rachel laughed, a hand coming up to tuck her hair behind her ear, and she stretched, arms raised over her head.

Melissa was so busy staring that she tripped over the edge of a mat and almost faceplanted straight into the floor.  If the humiliation hadn’t been bad enough, Rachel was the first one to reach her.

“Are you okay?” Rachel asked, alarmed, both hands steadying Melissa’s shoulders as she sat up.

Melissa covered her face with both hands and tried not to hyperventilate.  “Fine,” she squeaked.  Her voice was gone, departed for a mysterious destination, and she had to clear her throat before she thought she could speak again.  “Just clumsy.  Let me die of embarrassment in peace.”

Rachel laughed again, a bold, loud sound that echoed in the gym and drew smiles as it passed, and pulled Melissa to her feet.  “Everyone’s clumsy sometimes,” she said with a wink.  “Come on, did you manage to get that handspring combination over the summer?  Show me.”

“Okay,” Melissa said faintly, and she was gone.

The worst part of it all was that Rachel was totally, completely, one hundred percent genuine in her friendship.  They weren’t best friends, not attached at the hip like Rachel was with Cassie, but Rachel was fierce and proud and wild and Melissa would have challenged anyone not to cling to whatever she gave them.  For Melissa, it was friendship— _fine_.  _Done_.  Rachel didn’t need to love her back, just needed to smile and tell stories about her day and ask Melissa about Fluffer.

God, Melissa was hopeless.

At least she had the comfort of watching half their grade fall for Rachel, one by one, like dominoes.  Rachel was the sun and they were the planets caught in her wake, never given more than her light and heat.  It was going to take someone special to get close enough to touch.

Melissa had been in love with Rachel for two years when there was a strange and cataclysmic shift.  She didn’t know what it was.  But one day, Rachel came into school and she was blank, like a sleepwalker, or someone in shock.  She spoke to Cassie, and to her cousin, the big one, but barely seemed to remember to meet the eye of anyone else. 

At first it seemed like Rachel was just having an off day.  A busy week, maybe a head cold, a fight with her mom—everyone had bad days, even Rachel.  And she was better, within a few days, meeting eyes and smiling and laughing, but…

Not quite.

Rachel was harder, that was all Melissa could think.  The warm, willful girl Melissa had fallen in love with was changing right in front of her eyes, and she didn’t know why or how, only that it was soul-deep, altering the very core of Rachel’s self.  Rachel withdrew from her friends—not fully, not enough for most of them to notice, but she never invited anyone over, distracted easily in the middle of a conversation.  She was wired like nothing Melissa had ever seen, a combination of exhaustion that could be read right off her face and a never-ending wellspring of energy.  No matter how tired Rachel seemed these days, she could always kick into high gear the moment someone took her by surprise, or got in her face.  She stood with her back to walls, always knew the exits in a room.  A fire alarm went off during gymnastics and Rachel was able to say every person who wasn’t outside, like she kept a mental tally of everyone just in case.

Her face lost its softness.  Melissa had always thought of Rachel as the grown-up of their gymnastics class, hadn’t noticed that Rachel’s cheeks were round and her jaw was curved with baby fat until it was gone, leaving sharp angles behind.  Her eyes went from bright to piercing, until they were almost predatory, and being the object of her full attention was like being held at gunpoint.  She was radiant, and beautiful, and terrible, like something with blood on its teeth.

Melissa wouldn’t say she and Rachel were friends, not anymore.  Rachel had retreated from her, from everyone.  It didn’t matter.  Melissa had always been willing to take what she could, a planet orbiting its sun, adoring and distant.

Planets don’t leave orbit just because their sun goes supernova. 

Melissa watched Rachel change, into something ancient and fierce and ill-fitted to the modern world, and Melissa loved her.


End file.
